Secure Document Sharing & Online Workspaces for Financial Institutions

Transcription

1 Secure Document Sharing & Online Workspaces for Financial Institutions By Adi Rupin, CTO A WatchDox White Paper February 2012

2 The challenge Maintaining document security is critical for financial institutions to protect their business and maintain regulatory compliance but remains a challenge to implement. WikiLeaks and numerous other recent document leakage incidents involving highly sensitive documents make it clear that organizations need to rethink how they store, share and collaborate on documents. Activities within financial institutions such as commercial and investment banking, insurance, stock brokerage and others, naturally require highly sensitive documents to be exchanged, as well as the adherence to strict regulatory requirements. As a result, these institutions face multiple challenges when it comes to sharing and protecting documents and information. Risks include: An authorized insider accidentally (or maliciously) forwarding a document An employee leaving the company with documents copied to his or her thumb drive. An authorized third party transmitting documents that had been shared with him A third party that is no longer authorized to access certain documents, but already has these documents in his or her possession, etc. In addition, an audit trail is an important requirement for compliance. In the financial industry, organizations need to closely monitor where and how their content is consumed. Unauthorized document access, whether intentional or as a result of human error, can be prevented. Why legacy solutions are not sufficient Every financial organization has security mechanisms in place, such as long passwords, two factor authentication, firewalls, strict security policies and more. However, these were not built to address the need to share and collaborate on documents securely. Legacy solutions include: Perimeter security, such as Data Loss Prevention (DLP) and advanced firewalls. By their nature, such solutions may be able to block some documents from going out, but are unable to protect content once it goes beyond the organization, or documents that are increasingly stored in the cloud or on mobile devices. Page 2

3 or document encryption solutions. These protect content in- transit, but are not able to prevent a partner from copying, printing or forwarding a document you had shared once it arrived at its destination. Enterprise Digital Rights Management (DRM) solutions. These allow more granular protection and controls over documents, but are highly cumbersome and were not built to facilitate sharing beyond the organization boundaries. These obstacles and challenges call for a new paradigm, whereby documents are protected throughout their lifecycle, yet can be easily consumed. WatchDox document-centric security WatchDox seamlessly embeds security and controls into the documents themselves that follow the documents wherever they go. Therefore, the documents owner can restrict who can view, copy, edit, print or forward them at any time. WatchDox can also embed watermarks, set expiration dates and track the documents at all times. These permissions are dynamic, so at any given time they can be changed, documents may be updated or wiped altogether even after they had been downloaded! A key design principle for WatchDox is ease of use. The WatchDox service requires no passwords and software installation to send or view documents; it encrypts and converts the original documents into multiple formats so the documents could be seamlessly viewed on different devices PCs or mobile platforms. The WatchDox system serves the right document format that will cause the minimal disruption to the user on that device. Finally, WatchDox minimizes friction by seamlessly integrating into any system used by your organization (Outlook, SharePoint, salesforce.com). How WatchDox is used in the financial industry WatchDox is used extensively in the financial segment for many different use cases. Online Workspaces for M&A M&A deals require an efficient and secure mechanism to exchange sensitive due diligence information. It is important to be able to set up a secured space quickly and easily, upload the documents pertinent to the deal, and assign granular access controls. WatchDox Workspaces provide the easiest-to-use, yet most secure virtual data room solution. Users can set up the system, create shared spaces and upload data within minutes, using the web interface or a drag-and-drop application. The WatchDox Workspaces solution then ensures these documents are protected and that other parties cannot print or redistribute them without your knowledge or consent. If the deal falls through, all shared documents can be immediately wiped out even after they have been downloaded. Page 3

4 WatchDox Workspaces is the only virtual data room where the document level protection is an integral part of the data room. Legacy virtual data rooms try to address their document level protection gap by integrating their VDR with a legacy DRM solutions, thereby creating a bad (and expensive!) user experience. Board and executive communications Board members and executives work globally and need to gain access to extremely sensitive and heavily regulated information. Using paper is slow and expensive, while using electronic transmission of documents is quick yet extremely insecure. WatchDox provides a secure online document repository, with tight document controls. These controls ensure documents are always encrypted, and also restrict copying, printing and forwarding. Additionally it allows document revocation at any time. Access is possible from any computing platform, including mobile devices and tablets, such as Android, iphone and ipad. Financial research distribution Certain financial research institutions distribute high value regular or custom reports to their client base. Often, these reports are exclusive and must not be shared with individuals or companies that are not signed up for such services. WatchDox allows firms to easily set up large scale distribution of such documents in a way that is virtually seamless to the recipients (requiring no software installation or passwords), yet maintains full control and tracking over the content at all times. Investor reporting Quarterly reports and statements, capital calls and other sensitive documents need to be shared with potentially large number of investors. WatchDox provides an intuitive way to share such data with any number of investors, and keeps very tight control over these documents by preventing them from being copied, printed or forwarded without permission. All this can be done without requiring any software installation or passwords on the recipient side. WatchDox provides a new paradigm whereby security is seamlessly embedded in the documents themselves to facilitate the secure storage, sharing and collaboration on documents inside and outside the organization, and to enforce controls on documents wherever they go. Choosing a solution Here are 10 questions to ask when choosing a document security solution: Page 4

5 1. Does the solution truly protect my documents wherever they go? (Or does it provide only protection in-transit) 2. Does the solution allow secure sharing and collaboration with external parties? 3. Is the solution easy to use, and requires no software installation or IT resources to share or receive documents? 4. Can I revoke documents or remotely wipe them, if necessary? 5. Does the solution maintain a granular audit trail at all times? 6. Can documents be accessed from multiple platforms? (PCs, Macs) 7. Do I get secure access from mobile devices (iphone, ipad, Blackberry)? 8. Does the solution integrate into the systems I am using? 9. Does the solution support native viewing and editing of documents such as Excel sheets and Word documents? 10. Is the solution pricing model unlimited, or do I get charged per page, document or room? Page 5